Thermite Charge
What it is
A unique-category artifact that automatically drops a persistent burning patch under the ship on a repeating timer. The patch sits in world space at the ship’s position at proc time and continues to deal damage-per-second to anything inside its radius for a fixed duration after the ship has moved on. Reward card flavor: “Every few seconds, a burning patch is dropped under your ship.”
Identity
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Display name | Thermite Charge |
| Category | unique |
| Icon | 🔥 |
| Primary color | #ff4400 |
| Secondary color | #cc2200 |
| Bright/highlight color | #ff8844 |
| Damage tag | (none — type-agnostic) |
Per-tier values
The data file ships four tiers (uncommon → legendary). The runtime prepends a fifth “common” tier that reuses the uncommon values record (see EXTRACT-CANDIDATE).
| Tier | Interval (s) | DPS | Radius | Duration (s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Uncommon | 4.0 | 30 | 120 | 5 |
| Rare | 3.5 | 55 | 150 | 6 |
| Epic | 3.0 | 85 | 190 | 7 |
| Legendary | 2.5 | 120 | 225 | 9 |
Each tier upgrade simultaneously shortens the spawn interval, raises the per-second damage of the dropped patch, expands its radius, and extends how long it persists.
Effect
A single repeating-timer effect drives one proc per cycle. Each proc spawns a flame zone at the ship’s position, then flashes the artifact icon. The reward-card label is identical across all four tiers.
| Action | Parameter | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Spawn flame zone | center | ship position at proc time |
| Spawn flame zone | dps | tier dps value |
| Spawn flame zone | radius | tier radius value |
| Spawn flame zone | duration | tier duration value |
| Flash artifact | — | — |
Banner display on proc is enabled. The timer has no condition list — it fires unconditionally each interval. The flame-zone center is captured at the moment of the proc; the ship can then move freely and the patch stays behind.
Stacking rules
The artifact carries exactly one effect, keyed by a single effect id. There is no per-stack multiplier, no charge accumulation, and no on-hit/on-kill trigger — the only progression vector is tier upgrade. Multiple flame zones from successive procs can coexist in world space simultaneously, since each spawn is an independent zone instance with its own duration timer; the maximum number of concurrent zones is bounded by floor(duration / interval) + 1 at any given tier.
| Tier | Max concurrent zones (at steady state) |
|---|---|
| Uncommon | 2 |
| Rare | 2 |
| Epic | 3 |
| Legendary | 4 |
Summary
Thermite Charge is a unique-category artifact that periodically drops a stationary fire patch at the ship’s location. Tier upgrades shorten the proc interval (4.0s → 2.5s), raise patch DPS (30 → 120), expand patch radius (120 → 225), and extend patch duration (5s → 9s). Because patch duration exceeds proc interval at every tier, multiple zones can persist simultaneously — turning the ship’s trail into a damaging hazard field. No damage tag, no conditions, no special stacking — pure timer-driven trail of fire.
EXTRACT-CANDIDATE flags
- Common-tier value derivation. The data file defines only 4 tiers (uncommon → legendary). The artifact type doc states that the runtime prepends a 5th “common” tier on top via
getTierValuesAt(), which reuses the uncommon values record and differentiates via a separateflatBonus. Thermite Charge has noflatBonusdefined, so common-tier behavior for this artifact is determined elsewhere — likely in the runtime artifact-tier resolver and/or the loot/rarity tables. Document this once on the artifacts roll-up page rather than re-explaining it on each per-entity page. - Flame-zone subsystem. The proc delegates to a custom action handler that calls a shared flame-zone spawner. That spawner is the canonical “persistent ground hazard” primitive — it owns hazard lifetime, tick cadence, friendly/enemy filtering, and stacking semantics across all artifacts and abilities that drop ground fire. Worth a dedicated page on the effects-engine or combat side that this and any other fire-zone source can link to.
- Snapshot-vs-ship-position center. The handler reads its center coordinates from a signal snapshot if present, falling back to the ship’s live position otherwise. For a timer-driven proc with no inbound signal, the patch always centers on the ship at proc time. Document the snapshot fallback convention once on the effects-engine page.
- Ignition VFX bundle. The proc fires a fixed-shape VFX package on ignition: two shockwave rings (orange + red), three particle bursts (spark/spark/smoke at three radii and colors), a white-hot center flash, and 16 upward-biased flame particles. Same VFX convention reused across fire-themed procs — extract the recipe.
- Banner + flash_artifact + proc audio.
showBanner: trueplus theflash_artifactaction implies a shared HUD-flash + banner subsystem. The artifact type doc also documents an optionalprocAudioCuefield (Tick 68) — Thermite Charge does not set one, so by the type doc it defaults to silent. Confirm against the runtime whether unique-category artifacts have an implicit default cue, and roll that rule up onto the artifacts page. - Timer trigger interpolation.
timerDuration: '$interval'uses the$paramNamevalue-interpolation convention shared across artifact effects. Worth documenting once on the effects-engine page. - Max-concurrent-zones formula. The
floor(duration / interval) + 1figure above assumes zones are not despawned by anything other than their own timer (no count cap, no overwrite-on-overlap). If the flame-zone subsystem enforces a global cap or merges overlapping zones, the table is wrong and the rule belongs on the flame-zone primitive page.